Meet My Friend, Karen Cafarella!

Happy Friday! Today, I want to introduce you to my friend and fellow book-lover, Karen Cafarella. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask her for a photo, so I'll try to give you a glimpse of her. I secretly believe she's a sprite. Really! She's just a slip of a woman with a pixie hair cut, sparkling eyes, and a wide, welcoming smile. As soon as you meet her, you know you're going to like her. Like I said, she's a sprite!

I've known Karen since we opened Dog-Eared Pages. She was one of our very first customers and has always been supportive of our author events and our store in general. She paints, writes, and teaches yoga. As a matter of fact, when she first began teaching yoga, I was part of her 'practice class' and we held classes in the bookstore before we opened until she received her license.

She's also an organizing guru, so I asked her to write a bit about that since we probably all need a bit of help there.

Take it away, Karen!

Writing and Organizing! ! ! by Karen Cafarella

I am an Organizer by heart. For as long as I can remember I loved to keep things in
order. I understand not everyone is that way but you can be organized and feel at ease
with these few tips.

When people think about organizing, they think about getting the closet in order or the
kitchen, bathroom and garage in order; but what they don’t think about is the computer.

With most of us using our computers for just about everything we do from grocery lists
to writing poems or short stories or novels; our computer can get disorganized. So here
are a few tips to help:

If you are like me and still enjoy writing in a notebook, since they are much easier to
carry around; and you only keep a few pages in that notebook either transfer it to your
computer or scan directly onto a USB drive. As much as I love to write, my organizing
brain says I don’t need to keep all those notebooks and lets face it they can be hard to
store. Scanning is one of the easiest ways. It keeps all your writing in one place.

At times I do keep poems or stories on my computer for entering a contest. This way
they are readily available. In that case I set up folders. Instead of all your writing in
one folder separate by categories, short stories, poems & haikus and novels. If you
have a novel started but never finished and decided to work on another one, keep those
folders separate. Name them so it will be easy to locate when you want to work on
them. You can also keep a folder just with ideas in them.

Other parts of your computer can get cluttered at well. E-mail, go through daily if you
can and only save what is important. What needs to be saved for future reference put
in drafts, this way the messages don’t get deleted by accident. Favorites, go through
those every few months. We put so many sites on our computer to look at but most
times forget or never get around to it. By looking at them every few months it helps
keep the computer clean and organized.

Remember whatever you are organizing a little bit at a time goes a long way.

If you're interested in checking out Karen's book, you can pick up a signed copy at Dog-Eared Pages in Phoenix or on Amazon

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